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Former foreign correspondent details experiences of a shifting nation: Indonesia

MARK COLVIN: The new president of Indonesia, Joko Widodo - better known as Jokowi - won't be inaugurated for a while but his election itself is no longer in doubt.

Indonesia's Constitutional Court last week roundly dismissed the claims of his opponent, former general Prabowo, of widespread fraud.

The stability of the transition is a remarkable testimony to Indonesia's democratic process since the end of the Suharto era, and the country is changing in so many other ways too.

The epidemiologist, former foreign correspondent, and linguist Elizabeth Pisani has written a book about her widespread travels through the archipelago: 'Indonesia Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation'.

During the course of a long and fascinating talk, I asked her, for example, about social media.

ELIZABETH PISANI: Jakarta tweets more than any other city on the planet. The country is among the top Facebook communities and Twitter communities in the world, and they absolutely love to jump on an anger bandwagon.

MARK COLVIN: And you said Jakarta tweets more, but do you really mean Indonesia tweets more? Is social media becoming one of the things that ties this great archipelago together?

ELIZABETH PISANI: I have to say, there's a bit of a digital divide at the moment, and it does improve dramatically with every passing year. But a couple of years ago, when I started in Jakarta and I was going on this long trip and I thought 'OK, I'm going to get a you know no-holds-barred all media included, you know, X gigabytes of data 3G contract on my phone so I can tweet and I can Youtube and whatever.

And then I started on my journey in the south-east of the country on an island called Sumba, which is rather marginalised, and then I went anti-clockwise through the more forgotten areas of Indonesia and it wasn't until nearly five months later that I reached a city where there was an office that I could go into and stamp my feet and say 'you sold me a bum thing, it doesn't work.' And they said, 'well, no, of course it doesn't work in eastern Indonesia, there's no 3G in eastern Indonesia'.

MARK COLVIN: Interesting isn't it, because in Africa for instance, in a lot of countries in Africa, the arrival of mobile phone coverage and now smartphone coverage and 3G and so forth have had the most extraordinary economic consequences. Do you think that'll hit Indonesian rural life and village life soon?

ELIZABETH PISANI: Um, yes, and it already - I mean, everyone has a mobile phone, everyone. People have a mobile phone in places where there's no electricity, and so very often in tiny villages in the highlands of Papua for example, or in Maluku, on the outskirts of town, all the shops will have a charging station, and you can plug in your phone and plug in all your devices and charge them up, you know, get your messages, and then go back home again.

And sometimes, in some towns I've seen the fishermen run cooperatives where everyone gives them their phones, they go out far enough to somewhere where they can actually get a signal, the messages are all uploaded and downloaded, and then they bring them all in again and redistribute them.

MARK COLVIN: Brand new small business.

ELIZABETH PISANI: Yeah, and so it's making business possible. Just even you know stupid things like getting people to pick you up, to organising yourself around trips to the market which otherwise would have meant you know 16 people walking separately. But in the way it's revolutionising life in the cities and the way it's revolutionising politics in the big cities, not yet.

MARK COLVIN: So finally to politics. Obviously there's just been an election -

ELIZABETH PISANI: It's so exciting!

MARK COLVIN: Exactly. It was really, very, very quick in relative terms. The result came pretty quickly. The Constitutional Court took a while. But that in itself might have seemed surprising to an outsider who looks at this great archipelago. How were they able to be so efficient at that?

ELIZABETH PISANI: It's a miracle. Nothing in Indonesia works to schedule or on time except for the post office and the electoral commission. They do an amazing job. They had nearly half a million polling stations, and every single one of them had counted their votes by four o'clock in the afternoon.

One of the things is Indonesians are very, very good democrats. They really believe in the democratic process. Unlike Australia, you're not obliged to vote, which in a way is a good thing because it means you don't have politicians diving for the lowest common denominator in quite the same way, but people do vote voluntarily and with enthusiasm, and then they sit in the polling stations and watch every ballot paper being opened, and the result of every one being read out.

And because this election was particularly contentious, there was a huge almost spontaneous social media action to actually make sure that the vote was re-reported. There was a parallel system of tweeting in reports from every voting station to avoid the likelihood that there would be miscounting in a recount further up the line. It was really impressive.

MARK COLVIN: Prabowo was a sore loser, but he is now clearly a loser. Will Jokowi have a smooth ride now?

ELIZABETH PISANI: You know, Jokowi's biggest problem is the high expectations that are placed on him now. He's still embedded in a deeply transactional political system, and the horse-trading - or as Indonesians would say, the cow-trading - is already well under way. They're trying to consolidate his coalition and bring some of the parties that were in fact in Prabowo's coalition over to the Jokowi side.

It's not as important to have a parliamentary majority in the Indonesian system as it is in for example the Australian or the UK system because most of the business of government is done in committee, but still he doesn't have a huge party backing, and even within the party that backed him, the PDIP, there's a lot of squabbling and infighting.

MARK COLVIN: And for a while after Suharto, people probably over-used the phrase "Indonesia's fragile democracy". Can we stop using that now?